Tips and advice straight from the Lightroom team.

Preview of Lens Correction Solution for Camera Raw 6 and Lightroom 3

Below is a preview of lens correction technology that will be included in Lightroom 3 and the Camera Raw 6 plug-in that’s part of Photoshop CS5. This is an exciting development for our non-destructive editing technology and is designed to address lens correction via two methods: Lens Profiles and Manual Correction. The easiest application of lens correction is to apply the lens profile technology that encompasses geometric distortion(barrel and pincushion distortion), chromatic aberration and lens vignetting characteristics. A handful of lens profiles will be provided by default and a Lens Profile Creator Utility will be posted on Adobe Labs allowing photographers to create their own lens profiles using a simple procedure discussed in the video below. There are also manual distortion corrections that extend beyond traditional geometric distortion and provide horizontal and vertical transform adjustments.(As well as rotation, scale and crop to visible image data tools.) Please take a look at the preview video and provide your feedback!

Very very cool! I was impressed with the lens correction in Photoshop CS5 but having it in Lightroom is going to be great. I can see developing presets for my common body/lens combos so I can speed the correction process even more.

Tom, this is HUGE! If this works as advertised I’ll finally be to ditch DxO (which has always required separate steps as well as a separate linear DNG file). That you’ve been able to do this non-destructively is amazing!Any word as to when I can order the upgrade? ;^)

Very nice, but with the profiles do you have to manually create them all or does Adobe provide some kind of premade ones where you can apply and go? It also looked like through the exif data that it matches the lens automatically. The last thing would be is how would this work in LR3? Does it automatically apply profiles on import? Im curious as to how this would change the workflow.

Lightroom is an Amazing tool!Question… is there any chance lightroom 3 will be compatable with power pc? I know the new CS5 is not.There is a large population out here that are still running on high end G5’s (+$5,000 ). I am not looking foreword to a massive financial upgrade.[Lightroom 3 will not be PowerPC compatible. -TH]

About freaking time. Such an obvious, and essential, feature to include in Lightroom- especially as camera manufacturers are taking more and more shortcuts to cut the cost of lens design/construction by relying on software to fix lens distortion. Lightroom was almost unusable as a RAW conversion tool for images from P&S cameras like the Canon S90, which suffers badly from distortion especially on the wide end. This missing feature almost drove me to find something to replace Lightroom entirely. Glad to see Adobe finally got their act together and caught up to the myriad of other programs that already support this.

That looks great – nice work Camera Raw & Lightroom team! Looking forward to LR 3.The demo appeared to be for CR 6.1 – does this mean that CS5 as initially shipping won’t include the distortion correction? I’m assuming PS CS5 comes with CR 6.0.How does this interact with local corrections? i.e. If you do some spot removal and also use the adjustment brush, can you still go back and tweak the distortion correction (and vice versa)? That sounds like it could get complicated.

Camera Raw 5 and Lightroom 2 already do apply automatic distortion correction to the Canon S90 images, based on the camera metadata. The resulting image geometry when processing raw files through CR 5 and LR 2 should closely match the image geometry from the camera JPEG. There is still some residual distortion, by design.

Awesome, really happy it made it into LR3. Now we just need some musch expanded options with Adjustment Brushes, so it can rival Aperture 3. I *really* miss an Adjustment Brush that works with HSL-panel (would be a killer combo in my book) and I would like one that works with the new Curves also.

“Will it be possible for auto corrected images to retain the corners, and the flanks then be content aware filled ?”At approx. 3:50 into the video, he talks about the option of using the content aware fill on the image of the mall directory sign after doing the vertical perspective adjustment (right before he opts to use the autocrop function instead).Probably just depends on how much detail the content aware feature has to work with…

Very nice, Tom! I’ve been using DxO for this, but find that workflow very kludgy. Having these correction profiles and profile-making capability in LR will be a significant benefit. Being able to make a zoom lens behave more like a prime is a real leap forward.

This looks very nice, but to totally replace the need DXO optics pro we’d need selective lens sharpening based on their profiles. Also in your perspective correction example on the video there still appears to be some curvature on the lower edge of the sign. Us architectural photographers need real control in this area, it would be awesome if Lightroom delivered in this area. At the very least this means a lot less trips to DXO. Many thanks for the development

PS CS5 ships with Camera Raw 6.0 – the lens corrections will be in 6.1. Had to go to Rob Galbraith’s blog to figure it out, as he referenced an e-mail exchange with Tom Hogarty in which he said it wouldn’t be shipping with CS5, but would be available shortly after release.Would have been nice if it said something about that anywhere in this blog post – that was the big feature I wanted to test as soon as I bought the upgrade, only to find it MIA.

Lens distorsion of CANON S90 already corrected in Lightroom 2 : very good news !!From which version of LR 2, this correction is available ??Is this lens distorsion correction already available in LR 2 for other camera-lenses combination ??

Jacques, the latest version of Lightroom 2 is now 2.7 (free download for Lightroom 2 users) and supports automatic distortion correction for the S90. Earlier versions of LR have it as well (actually, ever since we added raw support for the S90), but might as well be using the latest.

> Enabling the Lens Correction on the> first image causes quite a bit of> distortion in the motorcycle gas tank> and the right hand of the rider.Correct, but that’s expected.It is neither an optical defect nor a lens corrections issue. It is simply the result of viewing a wide angle image from far away.For example, see bottom of this page:http://toothwalker.org/optics/distortion.htmlEric

Hi,I have CS5 at work, and love the new lens correction function, but my lenses are not in the list, i’ve clicked on the search online button, but it say’s nothing was found, without showing anything.Where exactly is this database, if i click manufacturer Nikon, lens , nikon, will it auto correct????? from the exif data?????Would it be possible for a response to these questions, i’m using a Nikon D300 + D700 with the folloxing 3 lenses 17-35 f2.8 – 17-55 f2.8 and a 24-120Many thanks for your time.Mike

As I mentioned on one of the forums, I’ve been eagerly awaiting perspective correction in LR but I have to say that, very disappointingly, the functionality falls short of that offered by GIMP, for example. LR seems to be restricted to vertical and / or horizontal adjustments while in GIMP you can squeeze or expand with greater freedom.

Is there any chance of improving it in LR to match? That would make my day.